music: “i can’t keep from crying sometimes”, by the deidre wilson tabac. the music was added later (“synchronized/rescored” by someone on youtube). in the original, the sound changes when the camera goes underwater.

“i am cuba” was a cuban/soviet production finally released by martin scorcese in 1995.

this shot was copied carefully by paul thomas anderson in the pool party scene in “boogie nights”.

this is a short film by jan svankmajer, called “tma, svetlo, tma” (“darkness, light, darkness”). it’s a claymation / stop-motion animation of body parts coming together to build a new body. the clay body is anatomically correct, so watch out!

jan svankmajer was born in prague in 1934. i really like his surreal animations. he shows the meat and machinery of the body parts fitting together. and there’s a lot of strange eating going on.

it’s snowing really hard here in saskatoon. the whole city is covered with snow. perfect! i always wanted to live in a world of white :) winter came early this year. it’s cold but it’s okay. soon sunny days will come and i’ll be living in a world of blue + white :)

i went to see “swan lake” by the national ballet of canada last year in saskatoon. it was so beautiful that i almost forgot to blink. there’s no ballet coming to saskatoon until next year, so i’ve been watching this instead.

according to farhad2000 from videosift, in russia these type of animations were shown on TV in the evening, so the whole family could watch together. most of the animations were based on fairy tales.

beautiful stories and beautiful colours. if only animations were like this nowadays, they wouldn’t cause pokemon panic. :P

i’m thinking about russia these days because my drawings got linked from a stylish russian design site, omami. from their post i learned how to write “plastique monkey” in russian, using the cyrillic alphabet. welcome to Пластик Манки. i don’t know how to pronounce it.

when i first started this blog, the header image was a different photo of mine, in black and white. the title was written in the “Soviet” font, which makes english writing look like cyrillic. the “O” is especially cool…

no wonder i couldn’t find anything about rinpa eshidan. their name “rinpa” uses the kanji “輪派” in japanese, not “琳派”. both combinations of kanji sound the same, “rinpa”. it’s a common problem in japanese that it’s hard to know which kanji are used to write someone’s name, since there are usually several possibilities. most japanese names are chosen as sounds first (in kana, the japanese syllables) — then you find kanji to make up those sounds.

i figured rinpa eshidan’s name would be written with the same kanji as the historical art style called rinpa (琳派). especially because “eshi” is the old-fashioned japanese word for a (traditional) painter. but instead, they chose the kanji “輪派” to spell “rinpa”. i guess they did it on purpose, to show a connection to japanese art tradition and to show their own philosophy at the same time. “輪” means circle in japanese. according to their blog,

rinpa is “circle” style. it’s a group that values the connections between people. the members are big fans of hip-hop and art. they get together once every two months to perform at clubs.

how did i find out about them? through the magical mystery of the internet. the director of the rinpa eshidan videos, daisuke yamamoto, contacted me through MIXI, the biggest japanese social network site (5,700.000 members).

i joined MIXI a few weeks ago after being invited by a japanese girl who used to live in saskatoon (i found her blog online, but she moved away just before i got here). MIXI is sort of like MySpace in japanese, but the pages are not so ugly. all MIXI members have to be invited by another member. anyway, i’d been wanting to find out about rinpa eshidan, so i wrote about them on my MIXI page.

a couple days ago, i posted their video, “1 week of art works” on my blog. just the next day, that video got promoted to the front page of YOUTUBE. the video now has almost 600,000 views and people really like it. since there isn’t any information about “rinpa eshidan” in english online, my blog post shows up when people search for them. but unfortunately i didn’t have any information about them either…

…until now. after he contacted me, i visited daisuke’s MIXI page and read a little bit about him. he’s a grad student at a fine arts university in tokyo. the video, “1 week of art works” was done for his graduation project (i’m sure he did very well!). he’s obviously very talented. at the same time he sounds like a very humble person as an artist, which i like.

he said that he’s working on setting up a new website and is also working on another new video! he’ll let me know about them when they are finished. so i’ll post about them then. also, it sounds like ABC will be showing a rinpa eshidan video on TV soon (or maybe it’s already aired. i don’t know. i don’t watch ABC).

this is a timelapse video by japanese street painters called rinpa eshidan. i don’t know anything about them, but i found their video on youtube (following a link to a different painting from tv in japan) and posted it to videosift. the video is called “1 week of art works”. they painted and repainted a wall for 7 days and took photos of it all the time. i really enjoy watching their work build on what they did before. their use of lines is very stylish, and the music is perfect!

“rinpa eshidan” means “rin school painters group”. “eshi” is an old-fashioned japanese word for “painter” and “dan” means group. rinpa was a style of japanese painting from the edo period (18th century). the style was to decorate everyday items to color life itself. i like that point of view so much. it’s cool that this new group of painters has named itself after the rinpa tradition, especially since they do such new work in decorating our modern urban lives.